The Marijuana Chronicles (21 page)

E
DWARD
M. G
ÓMEZ
is an art critic and historian, graphic designer, and environmental activist. He grew up in Morocco and Switzerland, and has lived and worked around the world. A former writer/correspondent at
TIME
, he has written for the
New York Times
, the
Japan Times
(Tokyo),
Reforma
(Mexico City),
Art in America, Art & Antiques, Metropolis, ARTnews, Raw Vision
(UK), and many other publications.

no smoking

by edward m. gómez

1.

I
never smoked pot correctly.

Smoking pot never had an effect on me.

Sure, like many other kids in high school, I tried the occasional puff. However, compared to the high-volume consumption of the school’s most devoted potheads-in-residence—theirs could have been measured in bushels, not ounces—my experiments with the legendary herb were, well, dopey at best. Laughable. Half-assed. Lame.

One time, having learned about my plight from one of the less-frequent but still avid tokers who, like me, was a straight-A nerd, one of the PIRs took it upon himself to come to my rescue and initiate me in the art and pleasures of reefer madness. But it was no go. Even that well-meaning tutorial failed, or I failed it. Either I did not inhale correctly or I did not hold enough of the holy smoke in my skinny frame long enough to feel its magic or I simply did not
believe
.

Perhaps that was it, for never before had I felt a need to escape from so-called reality, and even if I had, for me, this stinky stuff probably would not have been the ticket I would have chosen to take me where I wanted to go.

In fact, at school what I had wanted was to be able to penetrate and understand the “real” world more profoundly, with a richer sense of awareness than the average guy walking around in torn jeans and a rock-band T-shirt. I wanted to soar to new heights of consciousness and understanding, not be pulled down into the muck of pulse-stopping stoner bliss.

Maybe it was no accident that, while still in high school, during one of my routine prowls through a nearby college’s library, I discovered the branch of philosophy known as phenomenology and the existentialist writings it had inspired, as well as Aldous Huxley’s little book from 1954,
The Doors of Perception
, in which he described his experience taking mescaline, a hallucinogenic in the peyote cactus, which had been used for generations by indigenous peoples of the Americas. Still, although I found it fascinating to learn how certain chemicals could make a person view reality differently or even experience new, different realities, it was the one in which I was stuck that I still wished to inhabit—I still didn’t have a license to drive around in it—albeit with more of the sense of unpredictable adventure that characterized the movements of Alice and her cohorts in Wonderland than with the passivity and resignation with which so many people around me seemed to slog through their days.

Had I walked into my chemistry class to find a gigantic egg perched on the edge of the lab table, reciting indecipherable verse, I would have wanted to know how it got there; by contrast, the PIRs would have found in such a vision an irresistible affirmation of pot love and a good reason to light up.

Time passed. I was many years older when I got high for the first time. It was in a garden in which a single, exemplary pot plant grew—in a tidy collection of horticultural gems, it was more of a scientific specimen than its owner’s private, illicit indulgence—but even today I still don’t know for sure whether or not it was the marijuana that got me high. Instead, there was something else that flourished in that oasis, something else that must have intoxicated me on a balmy summer night many years ago. It was some other kind of elixir, not a rare herb or a strange vegetable or the essential oil pressed from the leaf of some exotic shrub. Instead it was the wafting scent of a spirit, and that spirit was Claire’s.

2.

High school, college, graduate school: I could not get enough of philosophy or art. In the past, having been the precocious kid who had covered the blackboard in “psychedelic” drawings when the class was out to lunch, I enjoyed nothing more than being left alone with my books to read for hours or with my colored pencils to create my own worlds on paper in long art-making sessions that stretched into the night. When I learned that skilled doodlers could make a living creating pictures for books and magazines, I focused my studies on that goal and became an illustrator.

For a while, after moving to New York, an artists’ agency represented me and found me jobs; nowadays, on my own, I’m able to find enough work to support my cat and myself. That summer, in fact, I was very busy. I was working on a children’s book and on a set of images of household appliances for a volume about twentieth-century inventions.

Then came the call. It was sometime during that very hot summer, and I was not expecting a new project to pop up.

“Hello, Eric? The illustrator?”

“Yes, this is Eric,” I replied. The voice was that of an older woman, raspy and friendly at the same time. I asked: “Who’s calling, please?”

“Oh, great. Glad I got you. I was leafing through some old magazines, and I came across your lovely illustrations. You have a charming style.”

“Thanks,” I said. “How did you track me down? How may I help you?”

“Well, I saw the name of an artists’ agency in one of those magazines, a company that represents you, and I called them and—”

“Right. That was a few years ago,” I interjected. “I’m on my own now.”

“That’s wonderful,” the woman said. “Talented people deserve to succeed. I hope you’re doing well. So, can you come over?”

“Uh, but you haven’t told me who you are and what it is you’re calling about,” I said politely. “Are you looking for an illustrator for a publishing project?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m Barbara—but everyone calls me Booba, although recently there’s been something of a backlash, or maybe it’s the heat—it’s so hot!—and some people have started calling me Baboo—anyway, it should be Babs, right? Isn’t Babs the nickname for Barbara?”

Barbara-Booba-Babs rattled on for a while before explaining that she lived in a town in the Hudson Valley, north of Manhattan. She and her husband would soon celebrate their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. She wanted to commission some illustrations of her home as a gift for her husband.

“You mean pictures of your house?” I asked. I wanted to be sure my caller did not want portraits of herself and her husband, either separate pictures or a double portrait. I did not like making portraits, for I always became too psychological about it; I always ended up seeing too much and then capturing it too obviously—too much of the anxiety, insecurity, and indecision I felt emanating from any sitter. People always wanted attractive pictures of their clothes or hairstyles. I gave them X-ray-like portraits of their vulnerability instead.

“Well, yes, pictures of the house and the yard,” Barbara-Babs said. “I don’t have much of a garden. You can have the run of the place and find any spots you think might capture its spirit. That’s the idea. I want to give Bob something special, a reminder of the home we’ve built together over—”

Suddenly B. went silent, as though responding to her own admonishment to stop rambling.

“Well,” I said, “it’s a bit of an unusual assignment. In effect, you’re asking me to produce a portrait of your home.”

“Exactly!” B. replied enthusiastically, her energy revived. “That’s just what I’m looking for! Could you do it?”

As busy as I was with other work, I was not eager to take up a new assignment, but it sounded like a challenge, and, I admit, my caller intrigued me. It was clear that if I accepted the assignment, I would have to meet her in person.

We discussed a deadline and my proposed fee. We set a date for a rendezvous at her house, at which time I would meet B. and make some preliminary sketches of what I found there. Confirming our plans, I thanked her for her call and double-checked the directions she had given me.

“I’ll make us a little snack; I’ll have some refreshments ready,” B. added before saying goodbye. “I love desserts.”

3.

“Hi, there! Nice to meet ya. Let’s smoke a joint!”

That was how Barbara-Booba-Babs greeted me when I showed up at her house in the late afternoon a few days after her phone call. In the scorching heat, I wore a nerd’s summer uniform of khaki shorts, a white polo shirt, and new sneakers with white ankle socks. B. arrived at the door holding a big, round pitcher of lemonade in one hand. She appeared in a billowing pink kaftan printed with blue and white polka dots, and her hair—I could see some dyed-red blond strands peeking out—was wrapped in what appeared to be a dish towel masquerading as a turban. Her face was round, like the pitcher, pale and glowing, with neatly plucked brows that formed perfectly symmetrical arches above lively brown eyes. I could tell she was a thin woman under all that fabric. Before I could respond to her invitation, though, B. had grabbed my hand and pulled me firmly into the house.

“Take a look around,” she ordered, “then head out back.”

As she darted to the kitchen at the back of the house, I took in the content and character of Barbara and Bob’s living room and dining room, and a short hallway that led to a staircase down to a lower floor. The house was built into the side of a hill, with its front yard and main entrance, where I had come in, on the upper level. Downstairs, I assumed, were the bedrooms. Out front I had noticed a gravel-covered driveway but no garage.

What I surveyed was a catalog of clutter, from 1960s Italian movie posters and large, animal-shaped sculptures of blown, colored glass to clear-plastic cubes at either end of a red-leather, club-room sofa and steel-framed armchairs with fuzzy, black-and-white-striped seats and backs. There was a cuckoo clock. There was a Mr. Peanut cookie jar. There were braided-macramé plant holders hanging from the ceiling with no flowerpots in their pockets; they held wine bottles instead. The dining room was packed with chairs—bar stools, bean bags, a Shaker straight-back, an antique rocker, an upholstered recliner—but no table at which to sit and eat a meal. An Oriental rug in the living room was old and faded; the green wall-to-wall shag carpet beneath it, which covered the entire upper floor of the house, was matted and needed to be raked—or ripped out and destroyed.

“Eric!” B. barked from the back of the house. “Come!”

I made my way through the kitchen to a screened-in porch overlooking, like a watchtower, a backyard dotted with a few large oak trees. The deep expanse of lawn appeared to be well-tended, and, catching my inquisitive gaze, B. explained: “That’s Bob, my husband. He’s good with grass. He takes care of the outside, and I take care of the inside—and Bob.” For a moment B. looked sad. Then, as I sat down, she cheerfully poured me a glass of lemonade and added, with a wink, “And I’m good with grass too. Here, try this.”

“What I was going to say before was, I’ve never been good at smoking pot,” I offered sheepishly. “Maybe we should talk about the pictures you want and—”

“Huh? What’s not to be good at?” my hostess retorted as she sucked on a joint the size of a carrot. “Here,” she said, shoving it into my hand and wrapping my fingers around it. She lifted it to my lips and placed it in my mouth like a mother teaching an infant to lick its first lollipop. “Now, I’m gonna light this, and you’re gonna breathe in and hold it—hold it till kingdom come, till the cows come home, till pigs start to fly. Just hold it!”

I wondered if watercolors, colored pencils, or my new set of colored felt-tip markers would be the best materials to use to capture, in art, the look and personality of Babs and Bob’s home. I breathed in. I recognized the sweet burning-grass smell. I tried to hold the smoke in my lungs. I also lost track of the time and started coughing and gasping for air.

“That wasn’t very good, Eric!” B. admonished. “Ya gotta do better than that in order to feel the effect.”

I gulped my lemonade.

“Here, don’t drink that. Drink this!” B. commanded, handing me a new glass, freshly poured from another pitcher that had been tucked away somewhere at her side. “This one has vodka. Drink up!” She watched me as, reluctantly, I guzzled the cool liquid like an obedient youngster drinking up all his milk.

“What are you looking at?” B. asked as she caught my eyes wandering across her backyard to her neighbor’s. The next-door property was filled with neatly planted shrubs, young trees surrounded by deer-intimidating protectors, exuberantly colorful flower beds, and a very full-looking vegetable garden enclosed by a fence made of chicken wire and old tree branches.

“Come on,” B. said, seizing my hand. “Let’s take a walk around the house so you can see the outside.” Pulling me down steep wooden stairs that led from the porch to the backyard, she led me around her house, back up to the front, where oak trees shaded the simple structure and big rocks surrounded untended flower beds. I made quick plain-pencil sketches in my notebook. B. sucked on the remains of the joint.

In the backyard again, we stood near the bottom of the stairs that led up to the screened-in porch. “I think I have it,” I announced.

“What’s that?” B. replied with a little cough. She pounded her chest with her fist.

“The views I’d like to paint to represent your home,” I said.

“That’s great, Eric! What do you have in mind?”

“Inside, the room with all the chairs—”

“Genius!” Babs declared. “I knew you were a real artist!”

“And outside, a view of the back of the house, looking up to the watchtower porch.”

“I like the way you think, kid,” B. cooed.

“But in order to get the right perspective, I’m going to have to set up my easel over there …” I pointed to a spot in her neighbor’s backyard, near the enclosed vegetable garden.

“Oh, Eric,” B. sighed, removing the remaining scrap of reefer from her lips and stashing it in the folds of her kaftan. “I don’t know. That would mean asking that girl for permission to let you set up in her backyard, and I …”